IBM wants to ensure everyone has the opportunity to purchase the gifts their loved ones desire most. To do that, they’re using IBM Watson to pinpoint this year’s top trends and determine which are likely to sell out first, thus giving savvy shoppers the wherewithal to buy those products first. The former Jeopardy champion extracts the sentiment from tens of millions of online conversations by skimming 10,000 sources across social media sites, forums, comments, blogs, reviews and ratings. Like finding a needle in a haystack, the app leans on machine learning and natural language processing to highlight patterns and trends that reveal why people are gravitating toward specific products or brands. Insights are then aggregated into distinct trend groups – content, context and sentiment – with each receiving a daily…